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I never thought a home run was as beautiful as a ball in the gap and Is he going to make it to second?' " Carew is aware that some people think he is inordinately fascinated with his batting average. From his wallet he plucks a gold card that reads, "For those who know me, no explanation is necessary; for those who don't, none is possible." After a pause, Carew says, "I don't need to be in the Hall of Fame to know what I've done, but maybe the election gives you a final sense of belonging. I don't know."
For a lot of reasons, most of them delightful, Pete Rose, 42, is forgiven his own preoccupation with statistics and can even get away with saying, "I want to be the first one to go into the Hall unanimously." At the Phillies locker next door, Joe Morgan's eyebrows are dancing. "I hope you don't think you're as good as Willie Mays," he snaps, and Rose grins. Morgan is not the sort who will need to have his career notarized, but Rose takes these things seriously. "I disagree with waiting five years," he says, typically hurried. "You're a Hall of Famer or you're not. And I say the more Hall of Famers walking around, the better for baseball. Why did [the old Yankee pitcher] Waite Hoyt have to wait until he was 69? We could have used him at 49. The best pitcher I ever faced was Juan Marichal, who went in this year. Why not last year?"
Rose is hardly likely to win every vote, even should he have the most hits of anybody who ever played. Someone will disapprove of his hair style or of the way he flattened Cleveland Catcher Ray Fosse in an All-Star game. But Rose will go in on the fly, and Morgan fairly briskly.
At 39, Little Joe is winding down now, but for five seasons, not just the two years he was MVP of the National League, Morgan was the whirlwind in Cincinnati's Big Red Machine, and over his 21-year career he has been the most powerful and productive second baseman since Rogers Hornsby. Morgan meets the simplest Hall of Fame criterion. He was the best second baseman of his era. Even in his dotage, Morgan showed others how to win. Possibly 'his enthusiasm for canonizations is affected by a premonition that Morgan's and Rose's silent partner in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, Tony Perez, will be overlooked as usual. Perez has 1,571 RBis.
Since Rose always seemed to be from another generation anyway, his formula for measuring eras may be authoritative. "The best then would be the best now, and the best now would be the best then," he says. Athletes are fitter today, obliged by the high stakes to train in the offseason. Mike Schmidt, the Phillies' two-time MVP, only 33 but allowed to contemplate Cooperstown, questions "whether Babe Ruth could even play now." A bit insulted, Rose responds, "Whatever the standard of the day is, the greats meet it. If .330 is leading, that's where Ty Cobb would be—not .380, the level for his day and his equipment, but .330."